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Painting and sharing in the new web site format Studio Journey, with our artist guide Nancy Hillis, brings the fulfillment of granting the permission to create, for many knowledgeable painters from all over the world. Nancy Hillis is an inspiring painter, teacher and medical doctor who brings us all together through the website to share her projects, resulting in the creation of art work and feedback from one another.

Thank you Nancy for leading our inspiring journey, which has just begun.

As a beginning, our first intention was to work in a series, encouraging experimentation within a framework of self imposed limitations. Some artists chose limited color range, some chose exploring art mark making. An amazing outpouring of creative production rose from this first task, generating a wide range of very well informed results. I hope to share some of these with you after I gain artist permission for the use of their works in my blog.

For now, I share with you the paintings I have created on this Journey so far. I lost my studio about a month ago and this program gave me the impetus to resume painting again. For that, I am indeed very grateful.

Which video below do you like better? Vote for #1 or #2 in comments below, then go see The Justice collection at:

#1

#2

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Reading Cy Twombly

By Mary Jacobus

September 16, 2016 ARTS & CULTURE
These images, selected from my book Reading Cy Twombly:Poetry in Paint, indicate the range and provocation of Cy Twombly’s works on canvas and paper, pointing especially to his inventive use of literary quotation and allusion throughout his long career and his relation to poetry as an inspiration for his art.

Twombly’s working copy of a paperback translation of Three Secret Poems, by the twentieth-century Greek poet George Seferis, shows his hands-on approach to quotation and revision as well as paint stains from his work in progress. A number of marked passages reappear in Twombly’s paintings of the mid-1990s, notably in Quattro Stagioni (1993–94) and Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor (finally completed in 1994).

One of a sequence of related drawings, Venus and Adonis (1978) wittily alludes to Shakespeare’s poem of the same title. Along with a series of cleft heart-shaped (buttock-shaped?) and phallic forms poised in suggestive proximity, each drawing contains a flower-like scribble and a foldout book. Perhaps Twombly is alluding to the “flowers” of poetry as well as to Venus’s rival, the boar who gores Adonis with his amorous tusk.

Il Parnasso (1964) riffs on Raphael’s Renaissance fresco in the papal Stanza della Segnatura. Twombly responds in his own fashion to the auratic cultural icons of Rome, drawing attention to the missing role of painting in the representation of learning and culture. The play of line replaces the playing of Apollo’s lyre at the apex of Raphael’s design. Signing himself in the shuttered rectangular window around which Raphael’s fresco arches, Twombly draws attention to the flat surface of the “wail” or support.

The early series of works on paper Poems to the Sea (1959) shows Twombly’s use of horizon line, wave signs, and quasi-writing, along with thick creamy paint, to eroticize the abstract play of repetition. In a series that makes reference to Sappho, Twombly also seems to be alluding to the typographical experiment of Mallarmé’s shipwreck poem, Un Coup de Dés, as a sequence of rhythmic marks and blanks. Non-referential signs tussle with the impulse to “read” and “write,” as if words and thoughts were about to be born from the waters of the Mediterranean.

Synopsis of a Battle (1968) takes Twombly’s blackboard paintings of the late 1960s in the direction of the era’s obsession with space travel, alluding to the blackboard calculations of NASA scientists as well as his own fascination with weightlessness. Abstruse mathematical formulas and recurrent fan shapes suggest orbiting gyrations, rather than battle formations. Cyanotype blueprints for gravity-defying Gemini and Apollo spacecraft were widely available at the time. Here, Twombly designs his own prototype.

Twombly’s paired paintings, Bacchus Psilax and Bacchus Mainomenos (2004) show the winged Bacchus morphing into his identical twin, the raging mad god who unleashes a title of blood. Painted during the bloodiest years of the Iraq occupation, when the first and second Battles of Fallujah brought the heaviest urban fighting since the Vietnam War, the Bacchus series has been linked to the fury of Achilles’s twelve-day brutalization of Hector’s body, towed around the grave mount of Patroclus. Twombly’s work elsewhere refers to the destruction of Sumerian cultural heritage.

The middle painting from Twombly’s sequence, Hero and Leandro (1981–84), suggests his interest in the whiteout—an obliteration that is also a kind of memory. As the sea washes through the story of Leandro’s drowning, the liquidity of water and paint eradicate the visible. Drawing on another Mediterranean narrative, Twombly combines his lifelong fascination with the sea with the erasure of a forgotten name, hidden in the darkness at lower right—not Leandro’s, but Hero’s.

Twombly’s “homage” to Sappho in Untitled (To Sappho) (1976) creates an erotic visual poem out of Sappho’s fragmentary epithalamium, using purple (the mark of consummation and death) both to celebrate and to mourn Hyacinthus’s death and transformation into a flower. The juxtaposition of paint and poetry marks the conjunction of the pastoral strain and the pastoral “stain”—painting and sexuality. Twombly’s relation to pastoral suggests, not so much nostalgia as the modern artist’s inextricable entanglement with sociality.

Twombly’s recurrent preoccupation with Rilke’s Orpheus sonnets emerges in numerous paintings, drawings, and sculptures. His collage Orpheus (1975) quotes from Rilke’s “Be in advance of all parting” (“be a ringing glass that shivers even as it rings”), beneath a repeated broken line that seems to record a break in the fabric of life. Here, an oblique line has its start in the faint pink of erotic passion. Spare and epitaphic, the broken ascent echoes Rilke’s emphasis on “the realm of decline” inhabited by the poet.

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Nava Waxman gracefully dances the fine interstitial line between becoming and being. She captures the manifestation of painting as a performance of the human spirit made manifest in paint.

Jan Kirstein

Written by Nikos Kount Littérateur

Untitled Wall is Nava Waxman’s interdisciplinary work, featuring a series of studio performances, from her extensive archive material spanning over the past three years to the more recent pieces.
It is an organic and visceral practice, as she is dealing with the concepts of metaphors and allegories which construct her performances and her ongoing research on how to portray situations that are comprised of various elements such as painting, objects, space and her body gestures.

Photograph by Nava Waxman

Click on thumbnails to enlarge

Her work does not acquiesce in an obvious self- representation and beyond her perspective as the creator with the physical presence in the process, she does not consider her oeuvre as completely autobiographical.
Waxman’s aesthetics are referential and by the use of classic art media in combination with New ones, she transform her ideas into a ritualistic Theatre. She conserves in her editing process a continuation of things past gone and of things yet to come. The essence of these junctions and additions influences how each of her artistic materials and techniques relates to each other. Thinking within the framework of object-making, her dilemma and principal focus is how to form an Image both expressively and critically charged while engaging with concepts around experience and representation.

Nava Waxman addresses and questions the traditional method of painting and whilst she deconstructs it, at the same time raises the task of painting to a coalescence of references; from the research and study of Art History to the factual and mythological and other fields such as Literature and Music.
The core of her practice and performances resides in the task of painting on her studio wall. The Wall has been painted over and over again with ephemeral paintings that resonate with the fluid time and space. Traces of paint, lines and faded images are there so as to be merged into something new. Her methods of painting transform the Wall into a Live Ephemeral Palimpsest that constantly changes. The narration of this exhibition is multileveled and concentric.

The context of examining the relationship between performance and visual art lies in the origin of the vast documentations material, since from the very beginning she used photography in order to capture the creation of the artwork as an Art as well. It is a celebratory continuous discovery and illumination of the action after its genesis. The combination of Technics and Time or as Roland Barthes wrote: A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: “light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”
The transitory nature and duration of the imagery coincides with her evolution as a painter. She is aware of the fact that the produced work will only last for a limited period of time. Capturing the random, the magical, the thoughts and the feelings made this wholeness tangible. In a way it is a struggle; Painting versus Painted.
These works assemble and at the same time epitomize this ever changing act of looking and most importantly her Solitary monologues, which have only ever taken place in the privacy and isolation of her studio. This exhibition marks the public nature and premiere of these series.

According to Nava, Life is an accumulative formation and this resonates with her painted wall or the covered up paintings. The Untitled Wall stands as a monument of Now, where time, space and feelings are interconnected and the way we perceive the momentum or the future is eminently affixed to our retention of the past.
The photographic sequences are offering an access to the artist’s inspirations and how they are transformed into a perpetual reminiscence of the collective memory. The associations and the situations established through her performances allow an open and unconditional platform for the beholder to experience.

“In this modern era when everything has existed in the past, images are disposable and the meanings misinterpreted, Nava Waxman’s endeavor is to question these circumstances and reconstruct the [ definition of ] Vision.”

Written by Nikos Kount Littérateur

Nava

Nava Waxman is a Toronto-based artist whose work ranges from drawing, painting, and objects to performance and photography.
Born in Israel (1974), she studied painting and drawing at the Toronto School Of Art and received her BA in social science and communications from Open University in Tel-Aviv.
Nava has exhibited in national and international shows and her work has been featured in numerous publications and is held in public and private collections.
She has been the recipient of the Canada Council of the art Travel grant as well as the Exhibition Assistance Grant from the Ontario Art Council. She lives and works in Toronto.

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Vision Board Project completed by Janis Kirstein at a Spirit of Sophia Workshop guided by artist April Martin in Spring of 2016.

Is it possible to manifest a dream with just the power of intention, desire, vision boards, visions, and creativity?

This is my vision: to be able to visit Paris. What is your vision? Dream and tell! Did yours come true? Tell us your story! Shown here is my Dream, starting with a vision board I made in a Spirit of Sophia workshop under the artistic tutaledge of artist April Martin.

And yesterday, after an inspiring day with guest writer Paula D’ Arçy at another enlightening Spirit of Sophia event, my Paris dream has been reignited! What a profoundly inspiring day we had with Paula as she led us through insightful and uplifting vision for our future. As for her Paris trip, check it out.

MEET PAULA:
Paula D’Arcy, a writer, retreat leader, and conference and seminar speaker, travels widely in the United States, Canada, and abroad. She is also President of Red Bird Foundation, which supports the growth and spiritual development of those in need as well as those invested in the opening of the heart and the healing of this world.
A former psychotherapist who ministered to those facing issues of grief and loss, Paula worked with the Peale Foundation, founded by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, from 1980 until his death in 1993, and has written ten books. Today her work includes leading workshops and retreats related to spirituality, writing, women’s gatherings,( including Women’s Initiation and Rites of Passage), and creating venues where men and women experience an opening of the heart and a change in their way of being in the world. In recent years she has teamed with Richard Rohr to present seminars on the Male/Female Journey and Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (for tapes from the conference on Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life and to purchase Paula’s books, click here.)
Paula also serves as adjunct faculty at Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX and Seton Cove Spirituality Center in Austin, TX.
Award: RED FIRE selected as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2001, by Spirituality and Health.

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Tomorrow is 2.22.16, the date of angelic manifestation of dreams. This is a dream and I am putting it out to the universe for a space to create. I invite you to have so much fun imagining what you would have in your creative space and what features it would have.

Please add what you would love to have for your perfect creative space.

The video above is made two years ago for manifesting a creative space and was for a Hatchfund project, which did not make its goal, but the dream still lives. I have also included some of my favorite images of a dream creative space. I know this will transpire when the time is right, because I have faith that the creative process is one of the greatest endeavors of the human spirit, and I feel certain that the universe will support the prayer for all people of this earth to aspire to create.

So please share with me the favorite aspects of your creative space. Send your photos of your space to me at janiskirstein@icloud.com